Dear Shari,
I love that idea--Zero Waste in a bag! I’m calling it that because what you’re teaching is a first principle of the Zero Waste movement: avoid resource destruction and waste of any kind before it happens, rather than just recycle or compost after the fact. It’s the environmental spin on Ben Franklin’s “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Take your first idea of the canvas bag, for example. You can recycle a paper or plastic grocery bag (a good thing to do, of course), but you COULD bring your own bag and help leave standing some of the 14 million trees cut each year in the U.S. to make paper bags. It could also help prevent the extraction of the non-renewable resources used to make the 380 billion plastic bags and wrap Americans consume annually. Now THAT is a much better thing to do.
In addition to the canvas bag, I’d also suggest the following for your kit:
Refillable beverage containers: Pack a reusable coffee/tea mug and a refillable water bottle to avoid contributing to the 25 billion single-serving plastic water bottles the Container Recycling Institute estimates Americans will buy this year. If you’re going with a plastic refillable water bottle, make sure your bottle is not a #3 or a #7 and be careful not to perpetually reuse a #1 plastic bottle. (Check out the archived column “Pocket Guide to Plastics” for more info.)
A “to go” container or two: I always take along a re-sealable glass container (I have one from Pyrex) for any leftovers from a restaurant to avoid Styrofoam, paper, or even recyclable aluminum containers.
Reusable lunch necessities: If you grab lunch on the go, have some reusable utensils with you (even reusable chopsticks) and a cloth napkin. According to the alternative packaging company Biocorp, 39 billion disposable eating utensils are used in the United States every year.
A clean get away: Last, but most importantly, I’d include a bike. The League of American Bicyclists estimates that if 100,000 Americans in a given city replaced a car trip with a bike trip just one time per month, it would cut carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 3,800 tons per year.
In addition to these items, I’d include a simple habit:
Just say “no thanks.” Let stores and restaurants know before they pack your goodies you don’t need a bag, napkins, utensils, chopsticks, etc. Remember these words when you go home at the end of the day and empty your mailbox. More than 100 million trees’ worth of bulk mail are delivered to Americans each year. According to the Center for a New American Dream, that’s the equivalent of deforesting all of Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. It can all be recycled, of course, but it’s better yet to prevent that resource destruction by taking a minute to call the 1-800 number on unwanted catalogs to be removed from their mailing list. Learn more about getting your name off national mailing lists.
Put it all together in your canvas bag, hop on your bike and you’re a Zero Waste hero on the go – stopping waste before it starts.
